Part of the debate – in the House of Commons am 12:00 am ar 4 Tachwedd 1965.
. I want to raise three points that concern North Wales. The first of them is the Dee Estuary project. As many hon. Members will know, that is something that has been considered for a number of years, Rather over a year ago, it was brought to a head when two private firms put forward a project for building a causeway across the Dee Estuary and suggested that it should be financed by a toll. Since then, as I understand it, the present Government have encouraged at any rate the setting up of committees of officials from both the Flintshire and Cheshire County Councils, and a model is being built at the Hydraulics Research Station at Wallingford to test the feasibility of the project.
It is a very important project, but it will not get anywhere unless two things are done. We must be clear in our minds first of all, what we want to get out of it, because there are certain differing advantages that could be gained. It could be made into a water conservation scheme, it could be made into a land reclamation scheme, or it could be made into a communications scheme. In varying degrees, we can get all those out of it, but much the most important one is the question of communications. If communications between Liverpool, Birkenhead and the whole of North Wales could be shortened, I believe that industrially, commercially, from the point of view of tourists, and as a residential area, the whole of North Wales would be immensely benefited by such a scheme. So I should like a clear decision by the Government that the communications aspect of it is the important one, because the traffic mounts all the time.
Secondly I do not believe that it will ever come off unless we get private money into it, and it will certainly not come off unless it is decided to have a toll. After all, there is a toll on the Forth Bridge, and there is going to be a toll on the Severn Bridge. In my opinion, we ought to have tolls on our motorways, because we should be able to get more built if we had them. I beg the Government not to turn their faces away from the provision of private capital and the idea of a toll. If they do, what will happen is that the project will simply go to the bottom of the file, because there is a lot of money involved. It will not be done unless we clear our minds about what we want, and get it done in the most economical way.
The second matter that I wish to raise is also on communications. Quite a lot has been done in recent years to improve communications in North Wales, and the two worst bottlenecks, the Conway bridge and Queensferry bridge, have been dealt with. We have two new bridges which are operating satisfactorily. But, as so often happens, when a bottleneck is removed, a worse one is created somewhere else, and I would say that one of the worst bottlenecks in North Wales now is in St. Asaph.
There has been a project for bypassing St. Asaph for many years, and almost the first letter that I wrote to the then Labour Minister of Transport when I became a Member of Parliament in 1945 was on behalf of a constituent of mine who was anxious because his house might be pulled down in order to make way for the St. Asaph bypass. That was 20 years ago. I was able to get an answer from the Minister that the construction of a bypass was not imminent and therefore that my constituent need not worry too much about his house.
No doubt if I wrote again to the Secretary of State for Wales, he would give me an equally robust answer on behalf of my constituent. I have been in correspondence with the Welsh Office about it, and faintly encouraging noises have been made, but programmes are going back, and I hope now that the Secretary of State has responsibility for Welsh roads he will not concentrate entirely on South Wales but will realise that in the summer there is a most devastating bottleneck in North Wales, taking people anything up to an hour to get through, and that the bridges over the Clwyd and the Elwy are dangerous for pedestrians to cross as a result of the weight of heavy traffic.